Video Games Profiling and Beyond

Performance is omnipresent and is a cornerstone of video game development. It is extremely important for players, almost as much as interesting and exciting gameplay.

Profiling tools should be used by all developers, from engine programmers who have to catch "spikes" and optimize code for the most diverse configurations by players have, to artists and game designers who analyze the technical aspect of game content.

We will talk about the specifics of profiling real-time applications, how performance testing became part of our development process, and most interestingly — we will look under the hood of our profiler.

We will discuss how we measure CPU performance, GPU performance, RAM/VRAM, disk IO and counters/statistics in detail. We will share the tricks we use to gather the information we need from the OS and video driver (even if they were reluctant to share it) as well as approaches to localizing problems in a complex and unpredictable environment.

This is done in order to gain the maximum from our players' hardware and please them with a beautiful graphics and leave a pleasant impression of the technical aspect of the game.